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MURRAY — Marsha Newby, pushing her son in a stroller, saw many familiar faces on Saturday, and she thanked them all.
Her son Uriel was born six months ago at the newborn intensive care unit at Intermountain Medical Center, where he stayed for five weeks until he was whisked to Primary Children's Hospital for an emergency surgery. Ever since, Newby has regretted that she never got a chance to talk to the nurses before she left.
"These people looked after my baby," Newby said. "You worry you didn't get to express how grateful you were because you were so worried."
She got to rectify that on Saturday, as she joined hundreds of people at Murray City Park for Intermountain Medical Center's 15th annual NICU reunion.
Organized by the hospital's NICU parent support group, Common Bonds, and the Utah chapter of the March of Dimes, the event brings together the families of children who were born at the NICU with the physicians, nurses and staff who cared for them.
A woman, passing by, recognized Newby, her face lighting up. This was a nurse who had treated Uriel.
"It happened so fast I didn't get to say thank you or anything," Newby told her excitedly. She added that Uriel's surgery had gone well. "Thank you for looking after him."
"It it just more meaningful than I can tell you," said Tawna Burton, a March of Dimes NICU family support specialist who organized the event, and whose two children were both born premature. "It is a healing event for both sides of the coin."
Scott G. Winterton/Deseret News
The NICU at Intermountain Medical Center treats more than 800 infants each year, including infants born as early as 22 weeks.
Burton said the event gives parents an opportunity to reflect on how far they've come, and allows the NICU staff to "close the loop" on the babies who are often under their daily care for months at a time.
As attendees danced to music, snacked on sandwiches and ogled a fire truck, Alice Adams, a nurse manager in the Intermountain Medical Center NICU, caught up with mom Jessica Sellers.
Sellers' daughter Quinn was born at 25 weeks. At the time, she weighed 15 ounces — less than the weight of a water bottle, and about the same size.
"She was so little that even our ventilator tubes didn't fit on her," Adams said.
Quinn spent 140 days in the NICU, much of it under Adams' care.
She's now five years old, perfectly healthy and dancing, at the moment, to the song "Gangnam Style."
"When people save your child's life, the relationship's really important," said Sellers. She comes back to the NICU reunion often, and has kept in touch with Adams and the other NICU nurses.
Sellers recalls that when she breastfed Quinn for the first time, Adams cried, too.
They teared up on Saturday, as well, as they reminisced about Quinn's birth.
"You get to love those babies and their moms and their dads," Adams said. "It makes you realize how amazing a job and a privilege it is."
Daphne Chen is a reporter for the Deseret News and KSL.com. Contact her at dchen@deseretnews.com.
